sábado, 30 de junio de 2012

With Spanish Lit Month finally set to kick off within a few short hours now, estimados lectores/chers lecteurs, I thought I'd take advantage of what little time is left in June to bring your attention to two French group reads (oui, deux of them!) that I'm looking forward to participating in this summer. First up is Balzac's 1833 Eugénie Grandet, which Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza and I will be discussing sometime during the last three days of July. Next up is Flaubert's 1869 L'Éducation sentimentale [Sentimental Education], which Frances of Nonsuch Book, Bellezza, and I will be posting on during the weekend of August 24th-26th. Feel free to join us for either or both of these works if interested and time permits.﻿

lunes, 25 de junio de 2012

OK, since a couple of you have expressed an interest in reading about some of the greatest hits in Spanish-language literature from a more historical perspective than the contemporary one I shared last week, here's one more list for you before my typing arm falls off. Please note that all titles below are Triple Crown winners: unanimous selections culled from the grad reading lists at Brown, Penn, and Yale respectively (Harvard's list, another fun one, seems to have disappeared from the web since the last time I looked for it, but I think I have a hard copy of it somewhere in case anybody's interested in seeing who the Quadruple Crown winners are--just kidding). This means that many prohibitive favorites didn't make the final cut because only two of the Spanish departments were willing to vouch for them as either required or recommended reading at this time. Also note that I had to doctor the period categories in red to account for the differences in how each university treats elastic concepts like "Siglos de Oros" (plural, Brown), "modernidad temprana" ["early modern"] (Penn), "Renaissance and Golden Age" (Yale), etc., and that errors in the publication dates listed are quite likely since the further you go back in time, the more probable it is that you'll encounter discrepancies between the time of writing and the time of publication of a work. Although I chose not to worry about that for now, one thing I might regret later is leaving off all the criticism works also recommended by the various programs--interesting stuff. In any event, I hope this list will prove to be a good resource for anybody looking for a Spanish Lit Month read or just looking for some insight into what some of the "must-reads" are for current grad students in Spanish at the three universities in question. Please let me know if you spot any mistakes I made or know of any translations I missed while transcribing the lists, and I'll update the post accordingly. One last thing: Thanks to Tom of Wuthering Expectations for reminding me last week that Obooki of Obooki's Obloquy had put out a related post on the Spanish canon way back in January 2008--well worth a look and a full four years earlier than this one!

lunes, 18 de junio de 2012

With the kickoff of Spanish Lit Month now less than a couple of weeks away, I thought I'd post these two Spanish-language "best of" lists together in one place in case any of you were looking for some last minute ideas to help jump start your reading plans for the event. Just to be clear, the Semana.com list comes from a 2007 critics' poll ranking the 100 best novels in Spanish-language literature published between 1982 and 2007. The Ignacio Echevarría list, which provoked some wonderful comments here back in February, comes from a 2011 book that the Spanish critic put out focusing on his proposal for 100 "essential" Spanish-language works from 1950 up through last year. Do you have any favorites on either of the two lists? Anything you think should have been left off?

Si te dicen que caí [literally If They Tell You I Fell but available in English as The Fallen in a now out of print 1979 Little, Brown and Company translation by Helen R. Lane] is by far the best book I've read this year since The Savage Detectives back in January. In fact, I'm certain that I won't be able to forget either Marsé's storytelling prowess or the raw intensity of his writing for quite some time. Let's see if I can explain. When the caretaker at a Barcelona hospital unexpectedly encounters the cadaver of a childhood friend sometime in the early 1970s, something about the look in "la cenagosa profundidad de pantano de sus ojos abiertos" ["the muddy swampland depths of the dead man's open eyes"] (11) takes Ñito back in time to the desperate days of his youth in the 1940s when his rag-picker friend Java and half of the city's poor street kids, high society types, gun-toting anarchists, and Falangist police informers all seemed obsessed with locating a mysterious blonde prostitute who had gone missing. What were they all after her for anyway? This dredged up memory in turn sets off a chain reaction of others in which a multiplicity of often unreliable narrators end up generating a series of their own interrelated but fragmentary reminiscences that are further mediated by the ingenious mechanism of the aventis: the partly true, partly speculative stories told by and sometimes starring the neighborhood kids in lieu of other amusements. The result is a supremely juicy but extremely distorted version of the events in which concepts like "truth" and "fiction" can only be found strewn among the minefields of memory laid down by the novel's narrators. In addition to the feverish narrative technique of the fragmented stories, Si te dicen que caí also stands out on account of its vivid, pull-no-punches rendering of the suffering and the sordidness of Barcelona in the aftermath of Franco's victory. Although the Barcelona-born Marsé claims in the introduction to the 1988 edition of the work that when he began writing the novel, "pensaba solamente en los anónimos vecinos de un barrio pobre que ya no existe en Barcelona, en los furiosos muchachos de la posguerra que compartieron conmigo las calles leprosas y los juegos atroces, el miedo, el hambre y el frío" ["I was only thinking about the anonymous neighbors of a poor neighborhood in Barcelona that no longer exists, about the violent youth of the postwar era who shared the leprous streets, the fear, the hunger, and the cold with me"] (7-8), it's obvious that, to a certain extent, this farewell to childhood of his also doubles as a bullet in the head of the Franco régime: the orphan-ridden city is in full conflict between the haves and the have nots, the nationalists and the recently-defeated communists, and even the tubercular kids and the healthy ones, and suffice it to say that seamy scenes of whores giving hand jobs in movie theaters for a peseta and the poor fighting over cats for sustenance don't paint a very flattering portrait of Spain in that era. The irony, such as it is, is that Marsé's writing is charged with such a heady mixture of tenderness and rage that you just might want to spend some more time with his "intrépidos hijos de la memoria" ["dauntless sons of memory"] (354) anyway. A fucking triumph. (Debolsillo)

[He tells that on lifting the edge of the sheet that was covering the drowned man's face, in the muddy swampland depths of his open eyes, he relived memories of a neighborhood of run down vacant lots and lopped-off geraniums pierced from one end to the other by the whistling sounds of a knife grinder: a blue howl. And that in spite of the elegant silver temples, the bronzed skin, and the cadaver's gleaming gold teeth, he recognized him--that everything had been an illusion, he said, back then on those streets, including this ragman, who at the end of thirty years was attaining his final corruption masked in dignity and wealth.]

viernes, 1 de junio de 2012

Thanks to all of you who have joined Caroline and me in her World Cinema Series and my Foreign Film Festival this year. I hope you're all enjoying the movie talk! For those who haven't yet participated but think you might might like to, please note that joining in on the fun couldn't be easier. Just write-up a review of one or more foreign films that you've watched this month ("foreign" meaning the director's country of birth or residence is different from your own) and then send us the link(s) to your post(s) via comments form or e-mail. I'll add the info below during the course of the month and Caroline will do the same over at her blog.

A Special Announcement

Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and I will be hosting a "watchalong" of Carlos Saura's 1976 Spanish drama Cría cuervos on the weekend of Friday, July 6th thru Sunday, July 8th as part of the Spanish Lit Month festivities mentioned elsewhere. The film is available as a Criterion Collection DVD and carried by Netflix here in the States and comes highly recommended by yours truly--though I hope you won't hold that against it! Anyway, if you care to participate in the watchalong, just post your review of the film during the weekend in question and then let me know. Group read-like discussions of the movie will take place at participating blogs throughout that weekend. Should be fun--hope you can join us.